Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

FOUR

In Aere

Phobian was a white blazing orb streaked with hints of blue and mottled grey. It floated tranquil and vast, its atmosphere a thin bright haze around its circumference. It had been almost two years since Jonah had been off-world, and it felt as though he were looking down on a picture from his past. The planet filled the tall viewport in the side of the ship, flickering now and again in the void shields that protected the hull.

Fornix joined him, his boots clicking as the magnetic fields in the soles hugged the steel deck.

‘By the Emperor and my faith, Jonah, it feels fine to be up this high again, to feel the engines of a good ship thrumming under my feet.’

Phobian swung round in the port as the ship began to wheel preparatory to full burn. They could see the terminator curve dark around the surface of the planet, and in the spreading night there was the tiny spangle of light that was Mors Angnar, cradled in the rugged peaks and glaciers of the Argahast Range. The Silverspears.

‘Perhaps Breughal was right,’ Kerne said quietly. ‘We must put some trust in ordinary men, and their resolve.’

‘Let us hope this Dietrich fellow has some iron in his backbone at least,’ Fornix said. ‘I pulled his files. He seems adequate enough.’

Kerne smiled. ‘I also. He is a veteran of twenty-eight years service in the Guard, but he only took command of the 387th three months ago. It remains to be seen how well that appointment takes.’

‘No matter what we find in the Kargad System, with Mortai and the Ogadai, nothing shall stand against us for long.’

‘Hubris, brother, is a dangerous thing.’

‘I merely state facts, captain. We have one hundred and eight Adeptus Astartes on board this ship. Whole systems have been conquered with less.’

‘And let us not forget Brother Malchai.’

‘Ah.’ Fornix grinned. ‘I did not see that coming, I’ll admit. What possessed him, do you think? The Chief Reclusiarch, ministering to the needs of a single company?’

‘Malchai keeps his own counsel, as he always has.’

‘He has never forgiven us for saving his life,’ Fornix snapped with sudden asperity.

‘Enough, brother-sergeant. As far as I am concerned, he belongs to Mortai now, and as a senior member of the Chapter he will be treated with nothing but the utmost respect.’

‘He has that, at least. I do not doubt that he has nothing but the welfare of the Chapter at heart, Jonah, but I will not say the same concerning his thoughts on you. He means to monitor your decisions, and seize upon any transgression he can find. He wants Thuraman to succeed the Kharne – they have always been close – and he sees this campaign as a means to advancing that end. Watch yourself, brother, for he will be watching you.’

‘You have spent too much time thinking of late, Fornix,’ Jonah said lightly. ‘It’s not good for you.’

‘I’m just glad I’m a–’

‘–mere sergeant, I know. You are first sergeant, do not forget, and if something should happen to me, then command of Mortai would devolve upon you. So do not play the bluff innocent. It may work with others, but not with me. I know you too well.’

‘Emperor forefend,’ Fornix said. He was grinning again. ‘Shall we continue to the bridge, and meet with the other great names of our expedition, captain?’

‘Lead on. And try to keep that mouth of yours in check.’

‘I shall be muteness itself.’

The two warriors clanked off down the steel corridor. They were in full power armour, in the dark livery of the Hunters, and they cradled their helms in one arm while bolt pistols were maglocked to their thighs.

Jonah Kerne’s armour was intricately damascened with patterns of liquid-streamed ceramite so that the glim lights overhead were reflected off it as from the surface of fast-running water. A work of ancient beauty and puissance, it had been worn by the captains of Mortai Company since time immemorial. The Kharne had worn it, as had several other Chapter Masters.

There was even a legend that Lukullus himself had had it made, back in a time when the construct of such artefacts was still possible in the Chapter forges. Jonah doubted that, but the armour was undeniably of great age, and the helm that came with it was of the older corvus pattern, with its raptor-like profile.

Jonah had worn it so long now that it was a part of him – true in a very real sense also, as the armour was plugged into his very anatomy at all the hardpoints which were surgically grafted into the carapace that underlay every Space Marine’s body. He could live within his armour for months on end, and had done so many times in the course of his long life.

Fornix’s armour was not of the same vintage. Although he was first sergeant of the company, he chose to wear a simple unadorned Mark VII suit with rank badge and Chapter symbol painted on the shoulder plates. The painting was inept – Fornix had done it himself – but that also was tradition. When Fornix had first been promoted, it had been in the smoking ruins of Mors Angnar, and he had painted his rank onto his armour in the midst of a smoking battlefield, using his own blood to make the stripes.

He bore no engravings, no purity seals or scrolls, and the armour, though well maintained and in perfect order, was a thing of pure utility. It had been repainted with cameleoline several times, as was common in the Hunters line companies, and small remnants of the chameleonic paint still clung to crevices and dents in the ceramite plates.

The heavy vault-like doors to the bridge rolled back in their grooves and the command section of the Ogadai opened out before the two warriors, a huge cathedral-like space with a long central nave and an upraised dais at the far end with high void-shielded viewports open to the stars. It seemed more a place of worship than anything else, and there was the same subdued reverence within.

Kerne and Fornix walked down the nave, past sunken pits on either side in which banks of servitors sat plugged into the mechanics of the ship itself, muttering to themselves and to the bowels of the Ogadai in binaric and machine-code, the data-tongues of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

They met human fleet members of the Chapter who each bowed as they passed, wide-eyed at their proximity to the Emperor’s elite, and came finally to the end-dais, where the high altar would be in a terrestrial cathedral. Here, there were upraised cliffs of monitors and dials and levers, watched over by fleet servitors, some almost human, some barely so.

And here also stood the shipmaster, Tomas Massaron, with his senior commanders, and towering over them in his tar-black power armour, Jord Malchai, his skull-shaped helm cradled at his side, the crozius arcanum which was both badge of office and deadly weapon in his other hand.

The Reclusiarch nodded curtly as Kerne and Fornix climbed the steps of the dais. The steps were crafted from the grey stone of the Argahast mountains, a little part of the home world to stand upon. The three Space Marines made a hulking trinity and acknowledged the salutes of Massaron and his crew with grave silence.

‘You will forgive me, my lords, if I devote myself to the workings of the ship for a few minutes to come,’ Massaron said. ‘We are about to leave orbit.’

‘By all means, shipmaster,’ Kerne said, and then watched with keen interest as Massaron, his human officers and the unblinking servitors stirred the gargantuan bulk of the Ogadai into trembling wakefulness.

The heavy cruiser was over four kilometres long, and had a crew of some twenty thousand humans and many thousands more servitors. Its main weaponry was a series of heavy plasma weapons known as lances, the most powerful of which, the Voidsunders, were mounted in the bow. Lesser versions were echeloned in broadside all down the angular sides of the cruiser, along with torpedo banks and short-range lasburners.

The Ogadai, given time, could blast through any void shield in existence, and had been known to cut enemy vessels clear in half. But it was unwieldy when it came to short-range actions, vulnerable to boarding. The cruiser carried its own soldiery in the form of the shipguard (they could not be known as marines), but it relied on its escorts to see off any smaller craft which sought to close. These escorts were a trio of ageing destroyers, the Arbion, the Beynish, and the Caracalla. They hovered protectively within a few hundred kilometres of the capital ship, their powerful augur radar sweeping out on all sides, searching for threats.

‘Coming round,’ Massaron said quietly. ‘Arbion, match course when I give the signal. Beynish, starboard flank, eight hundred. Caracalla, port one thousand.’

‘Acknowledged.’

‘Enginseer Miranich, you may engage main engines.’

A binaric crackle in response, and then in recognisable Low Gothic the servitor said, ‘Main engines, acknowledged, sir.’

They could feel the thrum of the ship’s power increase. The very atmosphere in the command chamber seemed to thicken about their faces. Minute changes in the artificially generated gravity field came and went. Jonah was able to sense the acceleration, and the long, slow wheel away from the planet below.

‘Arbion, stern three thousand,’ Massaron said. He looked over the towering screens and dials and blinking digital outlays which reared up before him like the ornate backdrop to an ancient altar. Beyond them the tall viewports soared up to reveal the utter dark of space, and the turning, distant course of a billion stars.

‘Steady, quarter flank. Course as set.’ Massaron was looking up at the viewports now, for a moment something like sheer joy written across his closed face. The vibration in the command chamber steadied, dulled somewhat. The Ogadai settled into its course, a creature of the stars in its element. Even Jord Malchai’s brow lifted as the great vessel began its departure from the Phobos system, leaving Phobian thousands of kilometres farther behind with every second.

‘We will be in interstellar space in four planetary hours, my lords,’ Massaron said. He adjusted his midnight-blue tunic, tugging it down over his torso to smooth out invisible creases.

‘Nicely done, shipmaster,’ Fornix said. ‘I felt nary a bump.’

Massaron bowed slightly, then caught Jonah’s eye. ‘If Mortai’s captain would indulge me, I would like to walk him through the ship and perhaps discuss some topics which our rapid departure has raised.’

Malchai opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. Senior Reclusiarch of the Chapter he might be, but now they had left Phobian, Kerne was in command; and there was no gainsaying that.

Jonah Kerne nodded. ‘Fornix, you might want to inspect our brethren in the troop holds. My lord Malchai, I would appreciate your presence there also. Our brothers would, I am sure, relish a sermon at this time. For some of them it is their first time off-world.’

Malchai met Jonah’s eyes with flat displeasure. ‘It is both my duty and my honour to do your bidding, captain.’

‘Follow me then,’ Fornix said. ‘I know the way. This thing is easy to get lost in.’

Malchai took his helm and deliberately set it on his head. There were several tiny hisses as the power armour locked it in place, and what there was of his humanity disappeared entirely. In its place was the ceramite sculpt of a grinning skull, the badge of his calling, white as ivory save for the two red lenses burning deep in the eye-sockets.

‘Lead on, first sergeant,’ his voice said, augmented slightly by the suit systems, but perfectly recognisable.

The two warriors left, stalking down the nave of the command chamber like massive gleaming statues brought to agile life.

‘I have not had the honour of the Reclusiarch’s presence on my ship before,’ Massaron said.

‘Quite an honour it is,’ Jonah said wryly. ‘What would you have me see, shipmaster?’

‘If you would follow me, captain. I think better when I am walking.’

They left the Command by a circular side-chamber in which pairs of servitors and human personnel sat side by side staring into what seemed to be identical screens.

‘The fire-control room for the forward lances,’ Massaron explained. ‘Every system is duplicated several times over, and can also be rerouted to secondary command, and even to engineering if that should become necessary.’

‘I have seen Voidsunders in action,’ Jonah said. ‘They are fearsome weapons.’

‘Yes, but slow to recharge. The Ogadai was designed to operate as part of a fleet of capital ships, each protecting the other. Since the Dark Hunters no longer possess a fleet of heavy vessels, the ship has been extensively redesigned over the centuries to meet the… rather more specific needs of the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘The troop holds.’

‘Yes. Much of the lower hull was gutted, and a lot of broadside ordinance removed so that the bottom holds could be enlarged to accommodate several flight decks and holsters for the drop pods.’

They walked along an endless glim-lit corridor with heavy sealed doors on their right.

‘These lead down to the broadside batteries,’ Massaron explained with a wave of his hand. ‘Lasburners and torpedoes in most cases, with lighter plasma cannons for close-range work. Each battery is wholly self-contained, and is crewed by some three hundred men, plus the servitors.’

‘What about the Voidsunders – what is their complement?’ Kerne asked, rather more interested than he had expected to be. He had walked these corridors before, but almost a century in the past, and they were unfamiliar to him now.

The Ogadai might not have changed very much externally, but its interiors had been in flux for generations as the tech-priests and the servitors of the fleet worked endlessly on repair and refit and redesign. If the Primarch himself, mighty Jaghatai, were to come back after his centuries of absence, he would not know the ship which had once belonged to the White Scars.

‘We have two of the heavy lances in the bows,’ Massaron went on. ‘Each has a crew of some eight hundred. Fire control remains, as you have seen, with Command. In the last extremity, the lances can be either ejected from the main hull of the ship, or set to destruct in the case of an enemy boarding.’

‘Shipmaster, I have not seen any tech-priests on board ship.’

Massaron looked up quickly at the towering Space Marine. ‘They have a shrine at the heart of the Ogadai, and usually only travel the ship in cases where severe damage needs to be repaired, or new components are being outfitted.’

Kerne nodded approvingly. The Dark Hunters had endured a problematic relationship with the Adeptus Mechanicus since the days of their Founding, when the Blind King and his Titans had almost destroyed the Chapter. It was one of the reasons that the Hunters were so poorly provided for in starships and heavy armour.

It was also why Breughal Paine had agreed to undergo Dreadnought symbiosis, to preserve his enormous knowledge.

Simply put, the Dark Hunters did not like to send their brethren to Mars to be trained by the tech-adepts whose kind had once been their bitterest foes. Their Techmarines were few and growing fewer by the year; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mars had found themselves the objects of distrust and dislike when they had returned.

Mortai had a single Techmarine to its name, Brother Heinos. He had missed the last thirty years of campaigning, and had only returned to the Chapter the year before. He was a rare case, one of the few Space Marines in the entire Chapter that Jonah had never seen in battle. Even the recent Haradai replacements had all served in the Gulbec Pirate skirmishes.

Brother Heinos had been a neophyte destined for Ninth Company when Breughal Paine had seconded his own request for Mars.

The Space Marine and the shipmaster passed down endless corridors, some high and wide enough to take a Land Raider, others so low that Kerne had to stoop. They passed hundreds of fleet personnel in Hunters blue, heavy servitors with tracks in place of legs who were towing lowloaders of spares and supplies, and a platoon of the shipguard, the armed infantry of the Ogadai, who almost halted in their ranks at the sight of the Adeptus Astartes captain.

‘How many shipguard on board?’ Kerne asked Massaron. He had looked up the stats for the cruiser before boarding, but they were out of date, and fleet personnel were always in flux. The Master of the Fleet, old Gan Arix, had once told Jonah that keeping the ships crewed was like juggling raisins. You might drop a few, but there was no time to look down and see.

‘Almost two thousand. Most are from Phospherran, the desert moon on the edge of the system. Their fathers are miners and herders. We sign up several hundred every year.’

Jonah knew Phospherran. He had fought there the last time the Punishers had arrived.

‘The population has recovered then?’

‘Yes. The Kharne had whole populations relocated in the wake of the Punisher War, and they have bedded down well. Most of our people are from the border moons. Phorios never recovered, and is still uninhabitable.’

They had bombed the planet from orbit and seared it down to the stone, so deeply embedded had the Great Enemy been on that unfortunate world. Kerne had watched from a drop-ship, launched and then recalled when the extent of the invasion had become apparent. All possible resources had been withdrawn for the defence of Phobian itself, and the populated fringes of the Phobos system had been abandoned. He ground his teeth as he thought on it.

They boarded a massive hydraulic elevator and sank lower into the main body of the ship. The Ogadai was tall as a mountain, and it was said that there were chambers and whole sections within it that had remained sealed and forgotten for generations.

Roadways and ramps within the bowels of the vessel ran as busy with wheeled and tracked traffic as some planetary metropolis, and the footbridges above them were thick with streaming crowds of crew.

Kerne saw a heavy loader pass by on balloon-like wheels, hauling a serried crowd of servitors, their eyesights gleaming red and green, the overhead glims reflecting off the shining servo-arms. These had once been human, all of them, but they could now be plugged into the ship like any other mechanical component.

He could think of no worse fate for a human being – and yet every year there were a few who actually volunteered for the transformation, so harsh was the universe of this millennium. Mankind clung to life in any way it could.

But no Space Marine could ever imagine submitting to such a fate.

The vast spaces within the Ogadai opened up further, until small cyber-organic cherubim were able to flit overhead, the far-off bulkheads almost lost in a haze above them. The cruiser was indeed a self-contained world, teeming with life. It made Jonah somewhat uncomfortable to be constrained by this river of humanity. He had to remind himself more than once as he slowed his pace to match the shipmaster’s that this was a starship, a space-going component of his own Chapter, and not the greatest at that.

The Umbra Mortis, the Dark Hunters battle-barge, was several times the size of the Ogadai, though not at present able to proceed under its own power. The Hunters had long ago lost the technical ability to repair the barge’s immense warp-engines, but Kerne knew that even the Mortis’s skeleton crew was in the tens of thousands.

‘There are – what – a quarter of a million human personnel in the fleet?’ Kerne asked Massaron as they paused to ride another elevator ever deeper into the Ogadai.

‘Closer to three hundred thousand, captain,’ the shipmaster replied. ‘Most live and die on their ships, never setting foot on a planet. But it is a better life than most. It has purpose and honour. The Chapter clothes and feeds us and gives us a useful function in the Imperium. It is more than can be said for most men’s lives.’

Kerne grunted in approval. He found himself liking the square, contained shipmaster and his air of imperturbability. Such a man might have made a Space Marine, had he been discovered young enough.

‘And you, Massaron, how long have you been wearing Hunters blue?’

The shipmaster raised one eyebrow, and went so far as to scratch his jaw.

‘I was born on the Ogadai, captain. This ship and the Chapter it serves are all the home I have ever known, or ever wanted to know. The personnel of the fleet are my family.’ He seemed about to say more, but checked himself.

The elevator, a square of plasteel fifty metres to a side, came to a jostling halt, making Massaron grimace.

‘The ship is four thousand years old, captain. The repairs it requires are a never-ending process, and it consumes raw materials as though it were a living creature of great appetite.’

‘What is the lifespan of a vessel such as this?’

Massaron seemed genuinely taken aback by the question.

‘Given the due and proper maintenance it requires, the Ogadai is immortal. If we look after it, the ship will serve the Chapter for as long as there are men to crew it and space to travel in.’

Kerne suspected he had hit a nerve, and did not pursue the subject. He had noticed that some sections of the cruiser were better maintained than others, and the patina of age coated the ancient plasteel thickly. Cracks and splits had been welded over again and again, and in places the inner cabling had fallen down so that the crew stepped over it as one would over a dormant snake.

But the distant thunder of the engines was reassuringly solid, a background noise that was soon forgotten, and became part of life itself on the ship.

However, it was only a ship.

It was the Chapter that endured – that must endure. This human, however admirable, had a vision that was circumscribed by his surroundings and his lifespan, just like his fellows.

In the Adeptus Astartes the genes of the Emperor Himself were embedded, attenuated by the millennia, but never to be eradicated. In the very flesh of the Dark Hunters, in their blood, was their reason to be. A Space Marine who died in war had his gene-seed recovered from the battlefield no matter what the cost, and it was implanted into another who would carry on his work, his duty to the Emperor and the Imperium.

That was true immortality, not the feverish scrabble to repair an ancient starship, however august its history. The Ogadai was alloy and metal, plate and wiring. A Space Marine carried within himself the very essence of the living God.

It was rare to meet a human being who understood this.

‘This is the starboard drop hangar,’ Massaron was saying. The mismatched pair were now walking inside a space more immense than any yet seen, and there was a new smell in the air. The fug and stink of humanity was still present, but it was overlaid by the unguents and lubricants which attended all the heavy machinery of the Chapter.

Kerne’s heightened senses could also pick out the elusive fragrance of incense, the accompaniment of some prayer to the Machine God, and that scent immediately took him back to the Reclusiam on Mors Angnar.

A line of Thunderhawks sat on the deck plating like huge ugly birds, with their ground crews busy as a broken ant-heap all around them. A tracked servitor went past muttering in binary, dragging an ordnance sled piled high with missiles, the blunt, black-nosed armaments Space Marines called Rosaries, since they were fired in a chain of ten at a time.

The overheads glittered on long belts of brass-clad shells as they were wound into the armament cavities in the Thunderhawks’ noses. Many of the gunships had their innards and even their engines dismantled and set out on the slipways in front of the craft. They almost looked as though the ground crews were tearing them apart.

‘How many?’ Kerne asked. He knew, but Massaron might know differently.

‘Eight configured for troop deployment, eleven for close-in support,’ Massaron said. ‘We are short of spares,’ he added, frowning.

‘How many ready to fly right now, shipmaster?’ Kerne asked, his eyes narrowing.

The shipmaster gestured to a man in oil-stained blue overalls who had a multi-tooled prosthetic in place of his left hand. He was unshaven, red-haired, with sunken grey eyes.

‘Dinas, over here.’ And as the man approached, wide-eyed and saluting as something of an afterthought, Massaron demanded, ‘How many craft ready for immediate take-off?’

The man was staring up at the tall Adeptus Astartes captain, as were most of the crew behind him. He collected himself at once however, and the finger-tools of his prosthetic extended in what seemed a tiny shrug.

‘Three, shipmaster. One transport and two gunships. We are still taking in ordnance from the loading bays.’

‘This is Gerd Dinas, my deck chief,’ Massaron told Kerne.

Kerne reined in his temper. ‘When will the rest be spaceworthy?’

Dinas scratched his head with a thin finger-blade. ‘My lord, it will be several weeks.’

‘Be specific.’

The man went white under his greasy red hair. His eyes closed for a moment. He looked as though he had not slept in days.

‘Five weeks. We have yet to sort through the parts that the Forge-Master shipped up to us, and several of the Hawks are undergoing major maintenance – four have burned-out engines, and the machine spirits of two others have innate problems which are proving difficult to pin down.’

‘Would Space Marine pilots be of any use to you?’ Kerne asked.

The man flushed. ‘Why yes, my lord, their expertise would be invaluable.’

Kerne turned to the shipmaster. ‘I will second six flight-qualified battle-brothers to your people for as long as it takes to get these craft in battle order, Massaron. This is a priority.’

Massaron blinked. ‘The voyage to the Kargad system will take–’

‘Irrelevant. We have no way of knowing what awaits us on the journey, and the Thunderhawks are my brethren’s most effective close-support and resupply system if we are to fight off-planet. They must be made functional without delay.’

Massaron bowed wordlessly. Kerne realised that he had wounded the man by chastising him in front of an inferior. Well, that could not be helped.

‘Lead on,’ he said in the same harsh tone. ‘If we can make a path through this confusion, then I wish to look upon the drop pods; and I hope that I will find them in better repair.’

His cold anger subdued even Tomas Massaron, and the ground crews seemed to catch some hint of it also, because for a moment the din in the hangar sank down, and there was an apprehensive lull.

‘If you will follow me, captain,’ Massaron said stiffly. They set off again, leaving the deck chief standing in mid-salute. The crews about the Thunderhawks parted for Kerne like waves opening before a rock, and none of them dared look upon his face.